Under the Personal Property Security Act, a pluggable HDMI box is the cleanest camera-system collateral you can register. The DVR in the closet is not.

Both, because the classification question is the same question in both systems. Under the Ontario Personal Property Security Act s.34 (and the mirror sections in the other provincial PPSAs), goods lose PPSA status and start being governed by real property law if they are affixed to land in a way that makes them a fixture. Under UCC section 9-334, fixtures live in a priority regime where a purchase money security interest has to be perfected by a fixture filing at the county real property records, not the state UCC-1 index, to beat a mortgagee. A device that is physically pluggable, non-affixed, and portable avoids the whole fixture analysis in both systems. That is what the Cyrano unit is, and that is why it shows up cleanly on a PPSA financing statement or a UCC-1 without any s.34 or 9-334 footnotes.

Because of how each one is physically installed. A typical office-closet DVR or NVR is rack-mounted or shelf-mounted, wired into a dedicated 120V receptacle (sometimes on a separate breaker), has cat cables running through wall penetrations to every camera at the property, and is often the only thing plugged into the PoE switch that feeds the whole camera tree. Courts applying the affixation test (degree of annexation, object of annexation, intention to make permanent) frequently land on 'fixture' for installations like that. Cyrano has the opposite physical footprint: it sits inline on ONE HDMI cable between the DVR and the wall monitor, plus ONE ethernet drop. No wall penetrations, no dedicated circuits, no modification to the building or to the DVR. Unplugging it in 30 seconds leaves zero trace on the real property. Under every affixation test we have seen published, that is personal property.

Split the collateral. The cameras and the DVR, because they are cabled into walls and in some cases hardwired to building power, are realistically fixtures for PPSA s.34 or UCC section 9-334 purposes, so file a fixture filing at the land registry and serve notice on the mortgagee. The Cyrano unit, because it is HDMI pluggable and portable, belongs on a standard PPSA financing statement or UCC-1 as Goods / Equipment, with the serial number. At default, your enforcement rights on the Cyrano unit are clean: you take possession on 30 seconds of HDMI reseating and walk out. Your enforcement rights on the cabled cameras and DVR are messier, because the mortgagee has priority under the fixture rules unless you perfected as a fixture security interest before the mortgage attached.

In the FF&E pile, every time. The affixation test for fixtures is physical and intentional. The Cyrano unit is installed with zero physical modification to the real property, is plainly portable, and has a retained serial number that maps to the PPSA financing statement or UCC-1. Trustees and receivers treat it the same way they treat a POS terminal, a laptop, or a keybox: it comes out with the equipment lender, not the mortgagee. The DVR in the same office closet is a harder call and depends on whether the property was financed as a building with the camera system included or whether the camera system was financed separately with a perfected fixture filing.

One HDMI cable spliced into the existing HDMI-out port on the DVR that feeds the wall monitor. One HDMI cable from the Cyrano unit to the wall monitor (the signal passes through, so the guard or office sees the same multiview they always saw). One ethernet cable from the Cyrano unit to the property network. Nothing else. No wall penetration, no drilling, no conduit, no dedicated circuit, no building power modification, no DVR firmware change, no DVR configuration change, no ONVIF or RTSP integration, no port forwarding, no manufacturer cloud binding. Installation is under 2 minutes. Removal is under 30 seconds. That is the literal collateral description you put on the PPSA financing statement and the UCC-1.

No. Cyrano reads the HDMI multiview that the DVR is already sending to the wall monitor. It runs a vision pipeline on the tiled output, masks the DVR-rendered overlays (clock, camera-name strip, channel bug), classifies each tile, and writes nine-field event records to its own dashboard. The DVR never receives a command, never gets configured, and has no record that anything is tapped, because the HDMI out is a one-way signal. Every piece of software value lives on the Cyrano unit and the Cyrano dashboard, both of which are the secured party's collateral, not the real property owner's equipment. The PPSA argument is clean: the DVR is the debtor's (or landlord's) property, the Cyrano unit and its software licence are separate collateral, and nothing about the tap creates an intermingling problem.

No. That is important for the lender and for the debtor, because it shapes the enforcement analysis. The DVR's own disks keep writing the way they always did. Removing the Cyrano unit means removing the indexed event log and the dashboard access, not the underlying camera recordings. For the secured party, that means taking possession does not strand the property in a no-coverage state that would trigger insurance or lender-side objections. For the debtor, it means the core legal-duty-of-care recording is preserved even if the indexed layer is repossessed. That clean separation is part of why a PPSA security interest in a Cyrano unit behaves more like a POS terminal lien than a fixture lien.

Specific goods description, not a blanket. Something like: 'One Cyrano edge AI video-indexing unit, model [model], serial number [sn], including power supply, HDMI pass-through cable, and ethernet cable, together with all replacements, upgrades, and accessions thereto, and all software licences, logs, and event data produced by such unit, located at [property address].' Specifically listing the serial number and the location keeps the filing tight, preserves priority against a later after-acquired filing, and avoids any argument that the collateral is part of the building. Some lenders also add a short recital that the unit is portable, HDMI-only, and non-affixed, which is not legally required but gives a receiver or trustee a fast answer if classification is ever challenged.

The underlying affixation test is substantially the same across the PPSA provinces, and the practical classification of the Cyrano unit (Goods, specifically Equipment) is the same. Registration mechanics differ, though. Ontario uses PPSR online registration under the PPSA, Alberta and BC use their provincial PPRs. Quebec uses the RDPRM and a hypothec instead of a security interest, and the equivalent of the affixation test lives in the Civil Code articles on immovables by destination. For a Quebec property, the argument is the same in substance: a plug-in HDMI device with no wall penetration is not an immovable by destination. Cross-provincial portfolios should file per-province for the location of each unit.

True leases over one year and PPSA-deemed leases (even short leases in the lease of goods business) are captured by the PPSA and need to be registered, even though title does not transfer. That is Section 3 of the Ontario PPSA. The same good physical properties that make the Cyrano unit clean sale collateral make it clean lease collateral: the lessor can repossess in 30 seconds on default without touching the real property, and the trustee in a lessee bankruptcy will recognize the lessor's ownership because the unit is obviously not a fixture. In the US the same analysis runs through UCC section 1-203 (true lease vs. disguised sale) and section 9-505 (precautionary filings). Either way, register.

A landlord lien in most jurisdictions only reaches personal property of the tenant located at the premises, and is subordinate to a prior-perfected PPSA or UCC-1 security interest. As long as the lender or lessor registered before the tenant-landlord conflict crystallized, the Cyrano unit comes out with the secured party. The fact that the Cyrano unit is plainly portable and plainly not a fixture also avoids a secondary argument from the landlord that the device was 'installed' into the premises in a way that makes it part of the real property. Landlord can still make that argument for the DVR (because it is wired into walls), but not for the Cyrano unit.

Not as of this writing. The case law on fixtures and security equipment runs through older fact patterns, hardwired alarm panels, rack-mounted NVRs, wired PoE switch infrastructure, and the odd integrated access-control keypad embedded in a door frame. There is no published decision yet that applies the affixation test to a modern HDMI-only AI edge box. Which is exactly why we wrote this page, because the classification for a device with this physical profile is unusually clean under the existing affixation test and we want the argument sitting on the internet in advance of the first contested filing.